[Congressional Record Volume 159, Number 77 (Tuesday, June 4, 2013)]
[Extensions of Remarks]
[Pages E782-E783]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




                   A REFLECTION ON OUR NATION IN WAR

                                 ______
                                 

                           HON. JIM McDERMOTT

                             of washington

                    in the house of representatives

                         Tuesday, June 4, 2013

  Mr. McDERMOTT. Mr. Speaker, I submit an important op-ed concerning 
our nation in war. Sebastian Junger is an author and documentarian 
whose work includes the book War and the film Restrepo, which tells the 
story of a platon of U.S. soldiers in the Korengal Valley in 
Afghanistan.
  For the past year, I have been working with Mr. Junger and Karl 
Marlantes, a decorated Marine veteran and accomplished author, to start 
a national conversation about what it means for our country to go to 
war. Mr. Junger's op-ed perfectly encapsulates the reason that 
Congressman Walter Jones and I introduced the bipartisan bill, H.R. 
1492, ``To establish the Commission on America and its Veterans.''
  Forty-three years ago, I left the military with a heart and head full 
of other people's stories from the Vietnam War. As a psychiatrist, I 
felt the anguish and confusion that my patients experienced as they 
came home to a country that did not understand, or take responsibility 
for America's battles abroad. As Mr. Junger points out, ``The country 
approved, financed and justified war--and sent the soldiers to fight 
it.''
  This is a nation in a perpetual state of war. Vaguely defined 
missions under banner of combating extremism have desensitized the 
American people. News comes as someone else's problem in someone else's 
country. Few understand how it can corrode our nation's fabric. Yet war 
is not something we can afford to forget.
  Consider the 1991 Gulf War, a conflict that lasted for less than two 
months. Today, we continue to spend billions per year paying 
compensation, pension, and disability benefits to more than 200,000 
veterans. 40,000 of those veterans struggle from long-term 
disabilities, some of which we are still only beginning to understand 
as part of ``Gulf War syndrome.''
  Mr. Junger's reflections on war extend beyond the economic or 
political dimensions, though both are important for our national 
security. It's about our moral duty to own the wars our soldiers 
fight.S0634

             Veterans Need To Share the Moral Burden of War

                         (By Sebastian Junger)

                [From the Washington Post, May 24, 2013]

       Recently I was a guest on a national television show, and 
     the host expressed some indignation when I said that soldiers 
     in Afghanistan don't much discuss the war

[[Page E783]]

     they're fighting. The soldiers are mostly in their teens, I 
     pointed out. Why would we expect them to evaluate U.S. 
     foreign policy?
       The host had made the classic error of thinking that war 
     belongs to the soldiers who fight it. That is a standard of 
     accountability not applied to, say, oil-rig workers or 
     police. The environment is collapsing and anti-crime measures 
     can be deeply flawed, but we don't expect people in those 
     fields to discuss national policy on their lunch breaks.
       Soldiers, though, are a special case. Perhaps war is so 
     obscene that even the people who supported it don't want to 
     hear the details or acknowledge their role. Soldiers face 
     myriad challenges when they return home, but one of the most 
     destructive is the sense that their country doesn't quite 
     realize that it--and not just the soldiers--went to war. The 
     country approved, financed and justified war--and sent the 
     soldiers to fight it. This is important because it returns 
     the moral burden of war to its rightful place: with the 
     entire nation. If a soldier inadvertently kills a civilian in 
     Baghdad, we all helped kill that civilian. If a soldier loses 
     his arm in Afghanistan, we all lost something.
       The growing cultural gap between American society and our 
     military is dangerous and unhealthy. The sense that war 
     belongs exclusively to the soldiers and generals may be one 
     of the most destructive expressions of this gap. Both sides 
     are to blame. I know many soldiers who don't want to be 
     called heroes--a grotesquely misused word--or told that they 
     did their duty; some don't want to be thanked. Soldiers know 
     all too well how much killing--mostly of civilians--goes on 
     in war. Congratulations make them feel that people back home 
     have no idea what happens when a human body encounters the 
     machinery of war.
       I am no pacifist. I'm glad the police in my home town of 
     New York carry guns, and every war I have ever covered as a 
     journalist has been ended by armed Western intervention. I 
     approved of all of it, including our entry into Afghanistan. 
     (In 2001, U.S. forces effectively ended a civil war that had 
     killed as many as 400,000 Afghans during the previous decade 
     and forced the exodus of millions more. The situation there 
     today is the lowest level of civilian suffering in 
     Afghanistan in 30 years.) But the obscenity of war is not 
     diminished when that conflict is righteous or necessary or 
     noble. And when soldiers come home spiritually polluted by 
     the killing that they committed, or even just witnessed, many 
     hope that their country will share the moral responsibility 
     of such a grave event.
       Their country doesn't. Liberals often say that it's not 
     their problem because they opposed the war. Conservatives 
     tend to call soldiers ``heroes'' and pat them on the back. 
     Neither response is honest or helpful. Neither addresses the 
     epidemic of post-traumatic stress disorder afflicting our 
     veterans. Rates of suicide, alcoholism, fatal car accidents 
     and incarceration are far higher for veterans than for most 
     of the civilian population. One study predicted that in the 
     next decade 400,000 to 500,000 veterans will have criminal 
     cases in the courts. Our collective avoidance of this problem 
     is unjust and hypocritical. It is also going to be very 
     costly.
       Civilians tend to do things that make them, not the 
     veterans, feel better. Yellow ribbons and parades do little 
     to help with the emotional aftermath of combat. War has been 
     part of human culture for tens of thousands of years, and 
     most tribal societies were engaged in some form of warfare 
     when encountered by Western explorers. It might be productive 
     to study how some societies reintegrated their young fighters 
     after the intimate carnage of Stone Age combat. It is 
     striking, in fact, how rarely combat trauma is mentioned in 
     ethnographic studies of cultures.
       Typically, warriors were welcomed home by their entire 
     community and underwent rituals to spiritually cleanse them 
     of the effect of killing. Otherwise, they were considered too 
     polluted to be around women and children. Often there was a 
     celebration in which the fighters described the battle in 
     great, bloody detail. Every man knew he was fighting for his 
     community, and every person in the community knew that their 
     lives depended on these young men. These gatherings must have 
     been enormously cathartic for both the fighters and the 
     people they were defending. A question like the one recently 
     posed to me wouldn't begin to make sense in a culture such as 
     the Yanomami of Brazil and Venezuela or the Comanche.
       Our enormously complex society can't just start performing 
     tribal rituals designed to diminish combat trauma, but there 
     may be things we can do. The therapeutic power of 
     storytelling, for example, could give combat veterans an 
     emotional outlet and allow civilians to demonstrate their 
     personal involvement. On Memorial Day or Veterans Day, in 
     addition to traditional parades, communities could make their 
     city or town hall available for vets to tell their stories. 
     Each could get, say, 10 minutes to tell his or her experience 
     at war.
       Attendance could not be mandatory, but on that day ``I 
     support the troops'' would mean spending hours listening to 
     our vets. We would hear a lot of anger and pain. We would 
     also hear a lot of pride. Some of what would be said would 
     make you uncomfortable, whether you are liberal or 
     conservative, military or nonmilitary, young or old. But 
     there is no point in having a conversation about war that is 
     not completely honest.
       Let them speak. They deserve it. In addition to getting our 
     veterans back, we might get our nation back as well.

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